The Story of the Cyrillic Alphabet
The Cyrillic alphabet is the writing system of the Slavic world — and of much of the former Soviet sphere. From Russian and Bulgarian to Serbian and Mongolian, more than 250 million people write in Cyrillic every day. Yet the script is surprisingly young, born in the ninth century from a direct act of missionary design.
Saints Cyril and Methodius
In 863 CE the Byzantine Emperor Michael III sent two brothers from Thessaloniki — Constantine (later called Cyril) and Methodius — to Moravia to evangelize the Slavic peoples in their own tongue. To do this, they needed an alphabet. Constantine devised the Glagolitic script first; Cyrillic, named in his honor, was a later refinement developed by his disciples, drawing heavily on Greek uncial letters and adding new characters for Slavic sounds that had no Greek equivalent.
The Cyrillic script was carried east by the Bulgarian Empire and north by the Russian Orthodox Church. By the medieval period it was the standard writing system for all Orthodox Slavic peoples.
Soviet Expansion and Post-Soviet Retreat
The Soviet Union's nationalities policy in the 1920s and 30s brought Cyrillic to dozens of non-Slavic languages in Central Asia and the Caucasus — languages like Uzbek, Kazakh, and Azerbaijani that had previously used Arabic or Latin scripts. The political motivation was clear: to bind these peoples culturally to Moscow and sever ties with pan-Turkic and pan-Islamic movements.
After 1991 several newly independent states reversed course. Azerbaijani switched back to Latin. Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan followed. Kazakhstan completed its transition to Latin in the 2020s. The map of Cyrillic is shrinking at its edges even as it remains dominant in Russia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Serbia, and North Macedonia.
Letters and Sounds
Russian Cyrillic uses 33 letters. Other Cyrillic-based alphabets add or remove characters to fit their phonology — Serbian drops letters unused in Serbian sounds, while Chechen and Abkhaz have added many more. The visual resemblance to Greek is clear in letters like А, Е, and К; characters like Ж, Ш, and Щ are distinctly Slavic inventions.
See how Cyrillic compares letter-by-letter with the Latin alphabet on the Latin vs Cyrillic comparison page, or view all scripts by family to explore related writing systems.